Facundo Calabró is the self-proclaimed Sommelier of Alfajores, which means he eats, drinks, and dreams this Argentine treat. He is an obsessed expert with an envious burden indeed. We recently slipped him a box of conitos while we were at the Fiesta Nacional del Alfajor. It inspired him to these poetic prose that simply blew us away:
For the love of Christ, I curse every day I spent without knowing Wooden Table's nibbles.
Moved by the ecstasy stirred by its presence, I compose these words; blinded by its stony chocolate, I write down its hieroglyphics; moved by its purple dulce de leche, hearing everything I want to hear from it, which it never quite finishes saying – rumor of incandescent magma, deep whisper – I endeavor to transcribe its untranslatable speech.
“Wooden Table,” small name for such magnitude. But with what kind of luck could the symbols of our poor alphabet reflect the entire potency of its muscular chocolate, muscular and angelic, angelic and robust? How - the greatness of its dulce de leche?, that enigmatic body, portal to the don't know where, blackest knot of obscurity and source of never-ending pleasure; heavy, too heavy, not moral, made of matter that is not of this world, eternal.
Even though their wrapping so informs us, these cones couldn't possibly be born in California, United States. (They will sooner be the idols of a foreign cult in Tlön.) But, in any case, it's in Oakland that God serves. One night in La Falda, at the end of the second day of the National Festival of the Alfajor, someone by the name of
Andrés – winged messenger or chosen prophet – appeared to me, gave me a box, and returned North.
Better than Havanna, better than Cachafaz? No: because it's a sin to equate the secular with the divine. It stings to see them between air and everyday things; like bombs of emptiness, they disturb reality, they undo it. What are they? Small primitive mountains, pertaining to a golden era where everything was purity, where everything was essence: the essential chocolate, the essential dulce de leche, the essential biscuit. Perhaps that.
Its image burns, but it is in vain: these blurry words aren't adequate to capture its essence, which is ineffable. That's why I choose those of others, those of a poet that sang to a cone that escaped the earth: “Give me your immutable stupor and the peace of your geological sphinx stillness.”
I shall silence my stammer, then; let the ancestral voice of these fucking phenomenal cones reverberate.
